They Marched Into Sunlight (36 page)

The scorecard in those areas was not perfect but mostly good.

The lives of wounded American soldiers were being saved at unparalleled rates by skilled doctors, nurses, and medical evacuation teams that could get wounded men to field hospitals within a half hour of a battle. There were complaints about mail service, to be sure, and a hot rumor spreading from base to base, according to army intelligence reports, that “pacifists employed in the San Francisco Post Office” were “deliberately delaying the mail in order to undermine the morale of troops in Vietnam.” Army postal authorities were said to have documented a deterioration in mail service and were investigating the cause. There were periods when the men got shut out for a week or more, then a whole delayed batch came in, but at other times the letters that Danny Sikorski received from his sister Diane in Milwaukee, for instance, came almost as dependably as if they were being sent to Green Bay instead of Lai Khe.

As for Westmoreland’s third necessity, if wars were decided by food alone, this one would have been an overwhelming victory for the United States. In an effort to make GIs feel at home, the military built more than forty ice cream plants in Vietnam. One was at the base in Lai Khe. In the First Division every effort was made to fly in at least one hot meal a day to troops in the field, often including gravy and mashed potatoes, with even a garnish of parsley—and pastries for the morning. When Alpha Company soldiers returned to base camp, they walked past barrels filled with Coke and beer on ice. Steve Goodman, a Black Lions armorer who also served as the unofficial acquisitions expert for his battalion, traveled down to Long Binh twice a month and was amazed by what he could find in the huge warehouses there—“everything from soup to nuts…Coke, Pepsi, piled as far as the eye could see, mountains of stuff.”

The list of basics was in Westmoreland’s wallet, but there were more pressing matters on his mind when his plane touched down at Tan Son Nhut Air Base that autumn Sunday night and he was chauffeured to his villa in a black Chrysler Newport that had four silver stars above the front bumper. For more than a week he had been exchanging telex messages with Major General Robert G. Fergusson, his former classmate (class of 1936) at West Point, now the American military commander in Berlin. Fergusson’s son Bob had been critically wounded, shot in the head, while serving as a forward observer for the 101st Airborne Division during a search-and-destroy mission in Vietnam on October 8. Young Bob was now at the Ninety-seventh Evacuation Hospital in Qui Nhon, slipping in and out of consciousness, his brain damaged, fighting for his life. Westmoreland could not possibly know the personal story of every wounded soldier under his command, so in a sense Fergusson’s struggle became representative of them all. He received hospital reports daily and passed them along to General and Mrs. Fergusson in Germany. Would medical care make any difference for this twenty-four-year-old lieutenant? The latest report from the hospital showed slow improvement, vital signs stable.

Westmoreland also had to deal with the fallout from a report from Vietnam that had appeared on the
CBS Evening News
with Walter Cronkite six days earlier. The story involved a company of the First Division at Lai Khe, in this case not the Black Lions but the First Battalion of the Eighteenth Infantry Regiment. Correspondent Don Webster and a cameraman had gone out with the battalion on a search-and-destroy mission and witnessed soldiers cutting ears from enemy bodies. Here is how it played:

Cronkite:
Ambush, surprise attacks, terrorism, brutality, all are part of the character of the Vietnamese conflict. It remains a basically guerrilla war defying the normal conventions of warfare. As such, it can produce savage responses, even among American GIs. CBS newsman Don Webster came across one example at a U.S. Army base camp thirty miles north of Saigon.

Webster:
This is not a pretty story. In fact, it’s a rather appalling one, but there are situations in this war which are appalling, when perfectly normal Americans under the intense pressure of combat do things they’ll later be ashamed of.

Last night this base camp, a unit of the First Infantry Division, had a sneak mortar attack. The VC fired hundreds of rounds of mortar into the camp, but the Americans fought back valiantly, and, as dawn came, their own mortars were still firing back. Many air strikes were also called in, pounding the jungle growth where the enemy was believed hiding. All in all, there was little doubt the Americans took more enemy lives than they gave up.

The Viet Cong like to drag away the bodies of their dead to confuse the Americans about how many casualties they took. In this case the Americans turned the trick, dragged Viet Cong out of the nearby jungle and into the camp. The main reason this was done was to get intelligence, to search the papers on the bodies and find out what unit they were with.

A base camp like this is an eerie sight the morning after a big battle. These men have brushed close to death, and death has passed them by. In a situation like this, nothing is treated more gingerly and more lovingly than the body of a dead companion. Many of these men are still in their teens, impressionable and emotional. They’ve lost a good friend. They also know it might have been them.

When the battle is over, some of the men keep souvenirs. This Russian-made Viet Cong rifle, and this light machine gun, both taken off dead VC. Sitting in a comfortable living room in the United States this will seem shocking, but you must understand the emotional state of some of these young men and their anger and sorrow at the loss of their buddies. A few of the Americans, as souvenirs of the battle, cut off the ears of the dead Viet Cong to keep as mementos. Of the three dead VC we saw, all three had one or both ears lopped off.

A few days from now these soldiers will probably be as aghast as anyone at what they’ve done, and the so-called mementos will be quietly thrown away or buried, but for now it’s a sort of revenge for lost buddies in a war in which dead enemy are found but no one knows exactly who killed them. It’s an emotional outlet.

There were no officers or noncommissioned officers present when this took place. They probably would have stopped this, and, if one must rationalize, we have no indication of what happens to the bodies of American dead which fall into Viet Cong hands.

Don Webster,
CBS News,
with units of the First Division near Lai Khe, South Vietnam.

Short of not running the piece at all, Webster seemed to do everything possible to place the barbarous act in a sympathetic, or at least understandable, context. But his words were lost in this case, overwhelmed by the visual presentation of disembodied ears. Army Chief of Staff Harold K. Johnson heard immediately from congressmen and senators, and he passed his concern along to Westmoreland, who passed it along to his aides, who went looking for answers in Lai Khe. The word came back that the ear-cutting incident did happen, though at first soldiers blamed it on the cameraman, saying that he encouraged them to cut off another ear after noticing an earless head. Westmoreland told Johnson he would supply a complete report as soon as the First division investigation was completed.

“I regret very much this incident,” Westmoreland said in a cable to Johnson. “It is, of course, absolutely contrary to all policy and cannot be defended…. A reminder relative to policy on this matter is being issued to the entire command.”

In addition to the wounded son of a fellow general and ears being knifed off near Lai Khe, Westmoreland was also preoccupied with two impending visits. Retired Lieutenant General James M. Gavin, his former boss at the Eighty-second Airborne Division, had accepted an invitation to take a firsthand look at the war zone, and Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey was also coming at the end of the month to represent the Johnson administration at the inauguration ceremonies for South Vietnamese president Thieu. Humphrey could be counted on to show the flag. From Westmoreland’s perspective, Gavin’s visit was by far the more ticklish of the two. This was not just another obliging old general desperate to relive his glory days by reviewing the troops one more time. Gavin was a mature star in the American military constellation, the heroic “Jumping General” of World War II who had led his airborne troops into battle at Sicily and Normandy and across the Elbe. Rather than fade away in retirement, he had served as ambassador to France under President Kennedy and had become an increasingly outspoken and independent voice on matters of foreign policy and military strategy. Once long ago, a year after the end of the Second World War, Gavin had taken Westmoreland under his wing, recruiting him to run his 504th Parachute Regiment at Fort Bragg. Now the two men were at odds over Vietnam.

In his public writings and speeches Gavin had denounced Westmoreland’s search-and-destroy policy, saying it was a grave mistake to believe that the war could be won through attrition. Even if the United States brought in massive numbers of men and firepower, enough to win on the battlefield, the strategy would only backfire, Gavin argued, by drawing the Chinese further into the war. For similar reasons he considered it a mistake to bomb North Vietnam. He suggested instead that the United States develop an “enclave” policy in which U.S. troops withdrew from the jungles and set up protective cordons around the population centers of the South. In the meantime they should halt the bombing of the North and push for a negotiated settlement. Westmoreland thought Gavin was mistaken in all respects, that he was too removed from the conflict to form an accurate assessment, and that a visit to Vietnam might soften his public posture if not change his mind. But once the invitation was accepted, Gavin loomed as a problem. Telexes from the Pentagon apprised Westmoreland of Gavin’s latest public utterances and made it clear that the White House—meaning President Johnson himself—was “quite concerned about what may eventuate” from the visit.

Gavin would be given the complete tour, Westmoreland assured Washington, with one full day in each corps and a final day in Saigon. It was important, he said, that the retired general spend at least five days in country. With that amount of time they could make the case that the war was being won. (In this, as in many things, Westmoreland was overly confident. After the tour Gavin would return to the United States and declare of Vietnam: “We are in a tragedy.”)

In Westmoreland’s victory scenario, which although optimistic still envisioned the war lasting at least two more years, the First Infantry Division played a central role. The Big Red One had to come through for him. Westmoreland had been insisting all summer and fall that the war of attrition was gaining momentum. The military situation, he maintained, had finally reached what he called the “cross-over” point—which meant that the number of enemy soldiers lost in battle exceeded the number being added through infiltration or local recruitment. His argument was partly a matter of political mathematics—who would be counted in the enemy order of battle and who would not be counted. (He agreed with his new intelligence chief’s decision to drop 120,000 Viet Cong self-defense militia from official estimates that fall, a controversial move that infuriated some analysts at the CIA, created a major internal dispute for months, and remained at the center of the Vietnam debate for decades thereafter.) But it was also a matter of offensive warfare. Westmoreland needed his generals to apply constant pressure, to stay on the offensive, search and destroy. And that meant he had to keep pushing the commander of the First Division, Major General Hay.

“Handsome John” Hay was by all outward appearances the very model of a modern major general. He rose from the Rocky Mountain West, a hunter, horseman, and skier from Montana with the rugged good looks that his nickname conveyed. He was six foot three with a sharp, clean face and perpetual tan. He had commanded a platoon and then a company of the famed Tenth Mountain Division in Italy during World War II and later served under Westmoreland as a battle-group commander with the 101st Airborne Division. But from the time he took over the Big Red One in Vietnam in February 1967, there had been a slightly uncomfortable rub in his relationship with the war managers at MACV headquarters.

Westmoreland and the III Corps commander, Major General Frederick C. Weyand, thought Hay was too slow, deliberate, and cautious. They went through the same routine after almost every battle. His superiors would bury Hay with faint praise, congratulating the Big Red One for its performance and then ask, pointedly, why Hay’s troops had failed to pursue the enemy at battle’s end and allowed it to slip away. Hay’s answer to Westmoreland, as he later recounted, was usually the same. “I told him that we pursued by fire (artillery and air) and that risk to troops pursuing overland into territory more familiar to the Viet Cong was not worth it unless we knew where they were.” Hay assumed that Westmoreland, who would have preferred “an aggressive overland pursuit World War II–style,” nonetheless understood and accepted his reasoning at least to the extent that he was not relieved of command. That was, in fact, a bit of self-deception: in correspondence with the Pentagon that October, Westmoreland had been plotting a rearrangement of his generals in which Hay would be shifted from command to a staff position, to be replaced by someone with “flexibility.” According to the transcript of a private discussion between Westmoreland and Weyand about the generals commanding their divisions, Weyand also wanted to have Hay moved.

“Hay has done a tremendous job with that division, but I can’t tolerate this business of walking away from a fight just because it gets dark,” Weyand said. “We have to hit these people when we have them, not just worry about night defensive positions.”

“The enemy isn’t attacking night defensive positions anymore anyway,” Westmoreland said. “You should have a heart-to-heart with John. I got the impression talking to him that he’s planning aggressive tactics.”